The Solar Polar Magnet Mystery

NASA Science News made international headlines a month ago by reporting that solar physicist Dr. Todd Hoeksema, Director of Stanford’s Wilcox Solar Observatory, predicted that the sun’s magnetic field would undergo a “complete” polarity reversal within the next 3-4 months.

Unfortunately, NASA Science News made misleading statements that fooled the world press.

The Big Shocker!

NASA erroneously stated that “something big is about to happen”. It isn’t. It’s already happening. Polarity reversal has been well underway for over a year!

NASA didn’t report that Hoeksema was only predicting when the south geographic pole would finish flipping polarity to “complete” the reversal. Buried at the end of the story, NASA did report that the sun’s north geographic pole had already switched magnetic polarity.

What NASA missed completely is that, as of this moment, the sun has two north magnetic poles and no south magnetic pole at all. That’s not supposed to be possible.

Right now we have a monopole sun! Our sun is nothing like a standard magnet.

According to the revealing (but hard to understand) chart above based on Wilcox Solar Observatory data… and in chronological order:

Solar Cycle 24’s sunspot maximum peaked in February 2012

The sun’s north geographic pole switched magnetic polarity in May 2012

Since May 2012 the sun has been a monopole magnet with only a north pole

Solar polarity reversal (averaging both north and south) took place in May 2013

The sun’s south geographic pole hasn’t switched magnetic polarity yet

Maximum solar sunspot activity was reached three months before the magnetic field reversal got into full swing. That is not unusual. It happened two of the three previous cycles.

That is a far cry from “something big is about to happen”. Cycle 24 reality is nothing like NASA reported.

Solar Polar Magnetic Mystery

The Sun’s magnetic field strength has been fading since 1975 (Source: Leif Svalgaard)

The biggest mystery of all overlooked by NASA Science News is the 40-year decline in the sun’s magnetic field strength and what it means.

Nobody knows for sure why the sun’s magnetic field is disappearing.

The sun’s dwindling field strength is rapidly closing in on the 1,500 gauss boundary. Below that is the point of no return for sunspots. That point will be reached around 2022 during the next solar sunspot cycle. It is one of many reasons most solar physicists predict that next cycle will be the least active sun in over 300 years.

In the August 5th press release, NASA Science News did point out that the waviness of a polarity reversal better shields the inner solar system against cosmic rays that can have an effect on earth’s climate.

The part left out is that cosmic rays trigger cloud formation which then reflects more sunlight that, in turn, has a cooling effect on planet earth. A new report confirming the effect was announced by the Technical University of Denmark just yesterday.

Also left out is that the 40-year downward trend in the sun’s weakening magnetic field allows more and more cosmic rays to penetrate deeper into earth’s atmosphere and cool earth’s long-term climate.

Conclusions

Even the most trusted news sources can get things wrong. That is what happened at NASA Science News on 8/5/2013. Usually they do great work.

The unfortunate side effect was that the world press assumed an oversimplified view of solar magnetic field reversals and missed out on all the really neat stuff!

Like, for example, the sun today is a magnetic monopole. Like, for example, the sun’s magnetic field is dwindling into nothingness. Like, for example, sunspots might disappear entirely. Like, for example, the earth might be made colder over the next few decades because of changes on the sun to come.

The sun doesn’t have a pulsar core. It can’t for at least two major reasons.

First, the sun lacks a pulsar signature.

A pulsar’s singular defining characteristic is a very powerful series of pulses made of radio and other EM radiation emitted at a regular, but slowly decaying, pace. They can emit upwards of 1,000 pulses/second.

The pulses are believd to be generated by a rotating, magnetic neutron star. They rotate at very high speed, orders of magnitude faster than our sun.

Earth’s sun has no such such defining pulses, therefore, by definition, it cannot have a pulsar core.

Second, if the sun had a neutron core, like a pulsar, then all its outer layers would instantly be pulled into the typically 12-mile wide neutron core and would cause a massive supernova explosion.

Thanks, azleader, for allowing posts that disagree with your own opinions.

I appreciate that. If you read Fred Hoyle’s autobiography you will find on page 153 that Fred Hoyle, Sir Arthur Eddington, and all if the astronomers and astrophysicists believed the interior of the Sun was iron until the end of the Second World War.

Suddenly in 1946 they all decided without debate or discussion that the interior of the Sun is hydrogen and H-fusion supplies it’s energy and makes heavier elements.

Measurements and observations show that:
1. The Sun and other stars make and discard hydrogen
2. The Sun made our elements and then birthed the Solar System 5 Ga ago
3. The Sun sustained the origin and evolution of life after about 3.5 Ga ago

I don’t have a lock on truth… I can be wrong as easily as the next guy. I’ll never know unless I listen.

I consider Hoyle a personal hero even though he staked his reputation on the Steady-State theory that ultimately proved wrong. He was a great communicator and spokesman for astronomy.

I was taught that hydrogen and helium were created in the big bang and that garden variety stars, like ours, fuse hydrogen into helium and later when they are compacted more by gravity will fuse helium into heavier elements.

I don’t have a subscription to Nature and/or Springer, therefore could only read the abstract to the the Kotov paper and the abstract and 1st page of the Toth paper.

Both papers talk about detecting a solar pulsation occurring about every 2.6 hours that is a billion billion times weaker (nano teslas vs. 1 billion teslas) than a typical pulsar’s pulse. The nano Tesla range for the sun’s pulses is shown in Fig. 1 and 2 of the Toth paper.

Kotov, in the abstract, says the sun’s pulse is “like a neutron star”, but NOT that the sun is a neutron star. Big difference.

If the sun is a pulsar, it is the weakest pulsar in the known universe. It’s pulsations can’t be from a true neutron star because that requires a minimum mass of at least 1.4 times the sun to form.

It’s more likely that the sun’s pulses are governed by entirely different physical processes than at work in a typical pulsar.

It is revealing that the titles of both papers are posed in the form of a question, rather than stated as a point of fact. In both cases they appear to be making the pulsar case based on the existence of an exceptionally weak pulsation.
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In reading your paper I’m confused by talk of neutrons attracting and repulsing things. A neutron is an electrically neutral subatomic particle. It doesn’t attract or repulse anything.

A neutron (essentially a squished hydrogen atom) is influenced by only two forces – gravity and the strong nuclear force.

In the case of objects larger than 1.4 solar masses, gravity is strong enough to compress electrons into nuclei to form neutron stars, but not strong enough to overcome the strong nuclear force that holds the neutrons together.

That is why a neutron star is the final stage of stellar evolution for large stars spectacularly ending their nuclear fusion lives as supernovae.

I also consider Hoyle a personal hero. His Steady-State theory better describes the universe that I perceive than the Big Bang model of a finite universe magically exploding from nothing at time, t = 0 .

Years ago when I worked in a food processing cannery during summer break from college, my future wife embroidered what I called my ‘big bang theory work shirt’.

She covered the entire back with little galaxies showing their momentum vectors. The front and sides were chocked full of graphs and things from various journal articles. They showed stuff like the known measured chemical composition of the universe, the measurement of the cosmic background radiation, the independently measured age of the stellar Universe, the expansion rate of the universe, how the distance scale of the universe is determined and things like that.

The BBT is the only theory that can explain all the known macro properties of the universe, including why the sky is dark at night.

In the end, even Hoyle renounced his own Steady-State Theory. Its hard to defend a theory that requires matter be continuously created out of nothing and can’t explain the universe’s chemical composition (particularly the 29% helium), its temperature and why the sky is dark at night..

A 10 to the 18th power difference in teslas between a typical pulsar and the sun is an unimaginably massive difference. That could not be hidden at the center of the sun. If there, it would obliterate all life on earth.

One thing I’m pretty certain of…the sun wouldn’t be behaving like it is right now.

Over the last 40 years the sun’s magnetic field (a strong characteristic of all pulsars) has decreased by over half and, at the current rate, won’t have any magnetic field at all by the mid-2030s! No sunspots, no CMEs, no flares… no nothing. See 2nd graph in article above.

I recommend breaking out the winter coats. Looks like we are gonna need them.

You are right… magnetic field strength does decrease as the square of distance.

However, there are still two problems:
1-A pulsar’s pulse is a directed beam and doesn’t followed the distance squared formula.
2-A billion tesla cannot dampen enough to be unnoticeable under almost any conditions

Pulsars were discovered because they are very powerful radio sources that can be detected at great distances. Up close, they are lethal.

The synopsis gives possible reasons for trying to hide the Sun’s pulsar core, despite hundreds of observations and measurements referenced there that indicate the Sun
a.) Made our elements,
b.) Birthed the solar system, and
c.) Reformed on the pulsar core.

“You are right… magnetic field strength does decrease as the square of distance.”

Newly formed pulsars have magnetic field strengths as high as 10^14 or even 10^15 gauss
[http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/Pulsars.html]

How much would the field strength drop in going from a 10 km neutron core to the top of the photosphere, 7 x 10^5 km ?